A subsidiary of NetSol technologies — the first and the only Pakistan-origin listed company on the NASDAQ — NetSol CONNECT is a network consulting and integration firm that specializes in the design, management and security of business-critical networks with its core focus in providing IP backbone services.
Need to meet customer bandwidth demands
From its inception, NetSol CONNECT has been committed to building a robust connectivity network across its home-country of Pakistan. Whether it is to ensure that banking customer data can be transferred securely in real-time or there are no hiccups in supply chain activities, today, several of the countries’ premier businesses in the banking, manufacturing and industrial sectors rely on NetSol CONNECT’s wireless networks to conduct day-to-day operations, better serve their customers and compete with their global peers.
In today’s economy, where most businesses have operations spread across the country, not to mention across the globe, being able to have virtual meetings, and real-time, secure access to voice and data files is critical to business success. Unfortunately, NetSol’s legacy infrastructure was proving incapable of meeting the high-bandwidth and reliability demands of these ‘digital-first’ customers.
As Babar Shafiq, chief technology officer at NetSol, explained, “When we were building our network infrastructure, we had to solve for two big issues. One was the terrain – the topography in several of the cities posed significant interference challenges. The second was cost. As you can imagine, Pakistan is a price-sensitive market. As a consequence, we took the decision to build a network with a mix of short-haul point-to-point (PTP) and point-to-multipoint (PTMP) wireless links. However, as our customers began to expand their operations and consume more bandwidth-heavy applications and services, our networks just couldn’t support their requirements. The network was also proving to be quite unreliable, with several instances of drops in connectivity and un-planned downtime.”
Performance at the right price
Having dealt with most of the leading wireless solution providers, it didn’t take long for Mr. Shafiq and the NetSol IT team to agree that Infinet Wireless would be the right long-term partner. Elaborating on the decision to select Infinet technology, Mr. Shafiq said, “For one, given some of the recent innovations from Infinet, the company now has one of the broadest portfolios of high bandwidth point-to-point and point-to-multipoint solutions available on the market. Secondly, a majority of our installations are in congested cities, so finding a solution that offered extensive interference mitigation and could function perfectly in NLOS conditions was imperative. Infinet’s solutions have in-built DFS technology which allows automatic frequency channel change with zero downtime in case of interference. Reliability and consistent performance was another critical consideration for us and here too, the Infinet solutions were able to surpass all our expectations during the PoC.”
“Finally, but arguably most importantly, the Infinet solutions offered us the best price-to-performance ratio. Given the extremely price-sensitive market we operate in, this was a very important factor in our decision,” added Mr. Shafiq.
Over a period of 12 months, Mr. Babar and the NetSol team worked with Infinet to deploy 15-20 point-to-point links. The company chose to use the InfiLINK 2x2 LITE for capacity requirements up to 50Mbps and a mix of Infinet XG500 and Quanta 5 for capacity requirements up to 500Mbps.
Improved customer satisfaction
Since switching to Infinet Wireless solutions, NetSol has seen a marked improvement in network speeds, quality of links and reliability. By meeting, and in many instances, exceeded client SLAs, NetSol is ensuring that businesses across Pakistan can now avail of bandwidth-hungry applications and services.
“At NetSol, we are laser-focused on customer satisfaction and providing our customers with the highest quality and value products and service. Partnering with Infinet Wireless is enabling us to make good on this commitment and ensures that our customers can compete with their global peers on a level playing field,” concluded Mr. Shafiq.
